Date of Award
Spring 5-1-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Music
First Advisor
Philip A. Ewell
Second Advisor
L. Poundie Burstein
Academic Program Adviser
Yayoi Everett
Abstract
Historically, the sentence has proven to be one of the most versatile and pervasive forms in music, appearing since the mid-sixteenth century with occurrences too frequent to quantify. Sentential musical phrases emerged from music and poetry during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the same short-short-long rhythmic impulse, originating from poetic and sing-song texts. Although the sentence is most often tied to the Classical period, it is not associated with any single era. Patterns of sentential phrases were already apparent and plentiful before the late eighteenth century, and composers used it as a device to expand musical form throughout the nineteenth century. The sentence was not defined as a theme type until the early twentieth century, when Arnold Schoenberg first established the sentence as a compositional technique for beginning composers and started teaching the concept to his students during the 1920s. In the late 1930s, he began to write a book about the sentence, and the concept was later codified posthumously in Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1967) and popularized by William E. Caplin in Classical Form (1998). Since then, musicians now routinely examine the sentence structure in countless works from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instrumental works, and professors often require collegiate students to identify them in theory courses. In the present study, I focus on sentence structures in Scriabin's piano etudes, discuss several issues pertaining to how the form is used, and offer a different cultural and historical perspective on a Russian composer from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Several instances within these works present phrases that strongly seem to be in dialogue with the concept of the sentence yet depart from the strict definition of sentence structure as applied to music of the High Classical Period. I build on existing research about the sentence by arguing for and against different perspectives about what defines a sentence and how they apply to Scriabin’s structures. I will define an archetype of Scriabin’s sentence, as well as identify and codify anomalies that deviate from the norm. I will address different viewpoints that concern both the sentence itself and its components: the basic ideas, the continuation, and the cadence. Finally, I will analyze cadential conflicts, including the quantity of cadences in the sentence and the types of cadences that may conclude a sentence, if any. Ultimately, I argue that several sentential instances in Scriabin’s etudes could be fairly understood as a late-Romantic formal type, despite departing from the specifications of the 2:2:4 proportions.
Recommended Citation
West, John Paul, "Sentential Structures in Alexander Scriabin's Op. 8 Etudes" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1469
